Dreams And Freudian Theory Essay Research Paper

Dreams And Freudian Theory- Essay, Research Paper

Dreams and Freudian Theory-

Dreams have been objects of boundless fascination and mystery

for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid

images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary

conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own

personal identity which we recognize as familiar along with a quality

of `otherness’ in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange

and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams

point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments

on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients

thought that dreams were messages from the gods.

The cornerstone of Sigmund Freud’s infamous psychoanalysis is

the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the

“via reggia,” or the “royal road” to the unconscious, and it is his

theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time over a period of

more than seventy years (Many of Freud’s other theories have been

disputed in recent years).

Freud reportedly admired Aristotle’s assertion that dreaming

is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps

the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief

definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming

increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity

differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973).

In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so

radically from what we take to be the essence of mental functioning

that Freud coined the term “Kingdom of the Illogical” to describe that

realm of the human psyche. This technique of dream-interpretation

allowed him to penetrate (Fine, 1973).

We dream every single night whether it stays with us or not.

It is a time when “our minds bring together material which is kept

apart during out waking hours” (Anonymous, 1991). As Erik Craig said

while we dream we entertain a wider range of human possibilities then

when awake; the “open house” of dreaming is less guarded (Craig,

1992).

Superficially, we are all convinced that we know just what a

“dream” is. But the most cursory investigation into the dream’s

essence suggests that after describing it as a mental something which

we have while sleeping,” and perhaps, in accord with experiments

currently being carried out in connection with the physiological

accompaniments of dreaming, such as Rapid-Eye Movements (REM), the

various stages and depths of dream activity as reflected in changing

rates of our vital signs (pulse-rate, heart-beat, brain-waves), and

the time of the night when various kinds of dreams occur, we come up

against what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the “Ding-An-Sich”

(’thing-in-itself’), and find ourselves unable to penetrate further

into the hidden nature of this universal human experience (Fromm,

1980).

It has been objected on more than one occasion that we in fact

have no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or,

speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them

as they actually occurred. In the first place, what we remember of a

dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts upon has been

mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory, which seems

incapable of retaining a dream and may have lost precisely the most

important parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when

we seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams, we find ourselves

regretting the fact that we can remember nothing but a single

fragment, which itself has much uncertainty. Secondly, there is every

reason to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary

but inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be doubted

whether what we dreamt was really as hazy as our recollection of it,

and on the other hand it may also be doubted whether in attempting to

reproduce it we do not fill in what was never there, or what was

forgotten (Freud, pg.512).

Dream accounts are public verbalization and as public

performances, dream accounts resemble the anecdotes people use to give

meaning to their experience, to entertain friends and to give or

get a form of satisfaction ( Erdelyi, 35 ).

In order to verbalize the memory of a dream that there are at

least three steps one must take. First putting a recollected dream

into words requires labeling categories, and labeling categories

involves interpretation. Next since the dream is multimodal, putting

them into words requires the collapsing of visual and auditory imagery

into words. Finally since dreams are dramatizations narrating a dream

is what linguist call a performance or demonstration and the rule, ” <

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